Getting my money's worth

I've been using our microscope for doing more fecal floats on the various goats in our herd and spent so much time on them one day that I got a headache from looking into the eyepiece so long.  I felt like I should have been wearing a long, white lab coat and those huge plastic goggles.

I've done tests on Nettie and found her worm load to be within limits (12 or so barber pole eggs) so I didn't worm her.  Then I did a test on Annette and her worm count was about three times higher than Nettie's so I wormed her orally with Ivomec.  A few days later I took another sample from Annette, hoping to find significantly less eggs, but there was only a slight improvement.  I'm still uncertain if I'm going to try worming her again with a different anthelmintic drug (fancy name for deworming medication) right away or wait until right after she kids.  She should be ok this far along in her pregnancy that the drugs shouldn't affect her pregnancy, but I'd hate for her to abort because of it.  MamaGoat's fecal came back within acceptable levels.

Then I did tests on my Boer gals.  Collected fresh turds (I hate it when people call it a "sample", it reminds me of samples of food given away at supermarkets) and got all scientific'y again.  Pickles, Lily and Penny were surprisingly sparse on worm eggs, and I've only wormed them once with the Positive Pellet medicated feed.  Not sure if Boers are just less susceptible to worms or if it's because I've had the dairy gals around here longer.

I still have to do tests on NewNew, Chop Suey and Herman then should be finished for a while.

I'm tempted to take a sample from the same turd deposit that I do a sample on and bring it into the vet just to see if our numbers jive.  I know there will be some inconsistencies, but I would like some confirmation that I am doing this correctly.  But I suppose as long as I do each test exactly the same way, at least I'll be able to determine if there is an increase or decrease in parasites.

Sad reminder about goat deworming

Annette has been coughing for several months.  Nothing bad, and it's usually only after rushing in to eat some "new" hay or after eating grain.  I just figured the coughing was caused by her eating too quickly, but then began to wonder if she had lung worm.  So I got my microscope ready & went out to get me some hot-outta-the-oven goat turds.  I didn't find any lung worm eggs, but I did find a surprising amount of barber pole (Haemonchus contortus) worm eggs, like three times as many as Nettie had on her recent test.  I had just wormed the entire herd with Positive Pellet Goat Dewormer on the 3rd of January and it is supposed to take care of that type of worm.  So either it did (and Annette had a lot of worms) or it is not working.  If you read any literature or articles about barber pole worms in goats, you probably already know that they have built up a resistance to many deworming medications.  There are many farms that will cull animals based upon their ability to be naturally resistant to them.

I went to the feed store to pick up another bottle of Ivomec injection as my supply was down to only half a dose.  When I got into the parking lot, there was young girl (maybe ten?) and her father carrying a Nubian doe out of the store and to their truck.  And the doe was making pitiful bleating noises.  Death noises.  I know this sound because I was there when one of our does was dying.  I asked him what was wrong and he said she was riddled with worms and that she was probably wasn't going to make it.  I wanted to ask more, ask if he'd try hitting her hard with a high dose of wormer, ask if he knew what kind of worms, etc., but the look on his daughter's face was so sad and despondent that I couldn't bear to hold them up any longer.  They carefully put the softly bleating goat in the back seat of the truck and drove away.

Now I was really, really determined to get something going for Annette's worm problem.  The grim reality of seeing that doe and hearing her pathetic groaning seems to give one a kick in the pants.

I bought a 200mL bottle of Ivomec injection and went right back home.  Although it is labeled for cattle and swine, it is used off-label for goats by just about every goat keeper I know of.  I put Annette in the milk stand with a handful of alfalfa pellets to keep her still and then gave her 3mL of the medication orally using my handy-dandy drenching gun (a must-have for administering meds).  Although the Ivomec is labeled as an injection, it is more effective to give it to the goats orally.

Since I did not run a fecal sample on Annette before giving the herd the Positive Pellet medicated feed at the beginning of the month, I cannot know how many, if any, worms were knocked out of her using that particular deworming medication.  Bad farmer, I know.  But now I have a baseline for "Before Ivomec" and will run another fecal on her in a few days and see if there is any noticeable difference.  Ivomec  claims that it will remove all types of stomach worms, but I have also read that an older type of wormer, Levamisole, is supposed to be able to knock out drug resistant worms and if her fecal shows up with lots of worm eggs again, I'll use that on her.

Besides doing fecal floats, I occasionally check the eyelids of my herd.  There is a color chart called FAMANCHA that gives you an idea of what the inner bottom eyelid should look like color-wise.  If it is pale (or white!) that means you probably have a heavy worm load.  This is because the parasites / worms literally drain all the red blood cells out of your goat and the normally pink pigment in the eyelid will be missing because of the nasties sucking it out of your goat, making the goat severely anemic.  Having said that about the FAMANCHA chart, I will say that I do not own one (it's just a little plastic card with the colors on them).  When first hearing about this method of checking for worm loads, I went out to my herd and almost fell over when I checked Nettie's color.  It was pale pink.  I immediately went berserk and wormed her.  Then after a while, I realized that I should have been checking the eyelids on a regular basis to establish a baseline.  Nettie just has paler eyelids than the rest of my goats, and after doing some internet searching found out that many other people said their white goats had paler eyelids than the rest of their darker coated herd mates.  There are also other signs of a high worm load such as reduced milk production, dull coat, diarrhea and in extreme cases, bottle jaw (lower jaw becomes swollen).

None of my goats are currently having any symptoms, but since I've got a saline solution ready and the microscope out I'm going to bundle up and go out to the goat pen to ollect samples from my Boer gals and see how they are doing.

Prego...Is it REALLY in there?

Well, the mass-produced spaghetti sauce may have "it" in there, but I'm not too sure if my goats have kids in there.

Lily is due in eleven days.  Maybe.

Lily, due in eleven days....OR forty-one days.

She's been looking a bit more rotund lately, but is she really due in less than two weeks?  She was bred twice, so it's either eleven or forty-one days.  She's no where as large as Annette is:

Annette, with a super-duper Muffin Top..or Side.

Annette is due one day after Lily's second potential kidding date.  Forty-two days away and would you just look at that bulge?! Annette has always had a hay belly and I've had people ask me if she was pregnant just after she kidded!

Both Pickles and Lily were bred at the same time so the first due date is January 30th and the second is March 1st.  Pickles doesn't even look much larger than normal so I'm betting she took the second time around:

Pickles.  Just a little bump showing.

Nettie was also bred two different times, so her kidding dates are either the 24th of February or the 2nd of March.  She's looking like she's got a little bit of a baby bump going, but she's also another hard one to judge.  One year I swear she was so small that I expected only one kid, but she ended up throwing three of them!

MamaGoat is due on on the 21st of March and NewNew is due on the 26th of March:

NewNew sporting a baby bump.

And then there's Penny.  The "Boer" goat (that turned out to be a Boer x Nubian cross) that was "supposed" to be bred anywhere from mid-July to the mid-October.  She doesn't look the slightest bit pregnant.  Well, maybe a little bit.

Penny......better be pregnant!

Hopefully that's because she was bred in October and still has until the middle of March until her kidding.  Would make perfect sense because two other goats are due at that same time and we wouldn't want to have them spaced out or anything.  Since coming here in the beginning of December she hasn't shown any signs of going into heat, hasn't been oogling over Herman and Herman hasn't been going crazy, so I'm hoping that she is, in fact, pregnant.  Especially since I swapped her with one of my pregnant goats.  Well, I suppose there is a chance that my girl wasn't pregnant, but I did hand-breed her and she never went back into heat.  Penny, however, was just left in with a buck for three months and the previous owner just assumed that she was bred.

This is going to be one of the most interesting kidding years yet.

It is my Purpose in Life to Amuse

Because I can find no other reason for my recent antics in the barnyard the night before last.

The RIR chickens are still being stubborn and refuse to roost with the other chickens in the coop.  You know, the one with the light on when it gets dark.  The one with fresh bedding.  The one with nice fluffy hay in the nesting boxes.  The one that will prevent them from becoming a nocturnal carnivore's midnight snackie.

It still absolutely amazes me that none of them have been eaten by now.  There have been plenty of opportunities for nighttime critters to take advantage of my forgetting to close the coop door as well as the daytime marauders that have often plagued the chicken yard.  I started with twenty and there are still twenty.  Want to know how I know?  Because I've been having to carry each and every one of the buggers to the coop each and every night.  And each night it becomes more and more difficult of a task.  They are on to me.

They've been huddling together in the corner of the barn (opposite of where they are supposed to be roosting) and up until recently I've been able to grab me an armful of squawking, flapping poultry and make my way over to the coop side with at least three chickens per trip.

There's been a full or nearly full moon for the past few nights.  Bright enough that one does not really need a flashlight to see one's way around the barnyard.  And apparently chickens have better night vision than I had previously thought because they have been scattering when I come up to the barn.  Once they leave the barn, I can no longer corner them and it's pretty much a chicken free for all outside.  They run under the barn, run under the goats, run into the goat huts, run back under the barn, run every stinking place but into the gawdforsaken well-lit coop.

After ten plus minutes of chasing the damn birds and swearing into the crisp night sky, it finally dawned on me that I could be using a net to expedite my chicken roundup.  There was a fishing dip net hanging in the barn (probably from some other long forgotten chicken catching foray) so I grabbed it and started chasing them with that.  Just as I thought I captured one in the net, the bugger ran away.  I'd manage to catch another one, and it would somehow get out.  I tried to "scoop" them into the net.  I slammed the net down on top of them.  I even tried some lacrosse techniques. I think to myself, what the hell is wrong with this thing?!  More swearing.

After the fifth chicken "popped" out of the net, I finally examined the net and found that there was a hole in it.

Facepalm

But of course by this time, what chickens I hadn't managed to bludgeon into unconsciousness and toss into the coop were pretty much hunkered down under the steps of the barn and there was no way they were coming out.

"Fine!" I yelled at them. "Go ahead and get eaten you freaking morons!" and I started stomping my way back to the house.  "But don't come crying to me when a raccoon is chowing down on your intestines while you're still alive.....that'll teach you a lesson!"

Except the only one that would be taught a lesson would be me.  Because I would curse myself up and down if I were to let any of them get eaten.  I've haven't been taking care of those buggers for the last four plus months only to have them become the equivalent of a late night drunk White Castle run for a couple of opossums.

So after a while I put my muck boots back on, went outside and managed to get the rest of them into the coop.  And now I have to modify my plan of attack for tomorrow night's round up.

Krazo Acres Biology Class

Today's homeschooling lesson was on Biology; namely pathogenic nematode eggs and amoebas.

The nematode eggs came from the backside of one of our goats.

Nettie had some poop'n problems on Monday ago so I dosed her with some Probios, Vitamin B Complex and limited her to hay & alfalfa pellets.  A day later, she was poop'n pretty much like normal so I gathered some fresh goat turds and went about to making a fecal solution to check for worms.

I had just wormed everyone on the 3rd of January with Positive Pellet Goat Dewormer and it is supposed to take care of Haemonchus Contortus (barberpole worm), Ostertagia Circumcincta (brown stomach worm) and Trichostrongylus Axel (small stomach worm).  I know, I know, I should be doing a fecal test before and after worming the goats in order to establish if the wormer is actually working.  One day I will.

Anyways, I tested Nettie's poop and found about fifteen (what I think are) barberpole worm eggs and two thread worms.  

Barberpole Worm Egg (I think).

I'm not too concerned about those numbers, but I think it's something I'll have to check up on again in a month.  Now I just have to remember to do it.  I also need to order some slides with grids on them.  When searching for stuff on slides, you're supposed to do a up-across-down-across-repeat movement in order to make sure you cover the entire slide.  But when searching at a higher magnification, it's difficult to keep on track.  I also found some other funky looking round things, which I am assuming are some sort of grass pollen.  The pollen is not in the air this time of the year, but we are feeding hay and I'm sure there's plenty of pollen trapped in the bales.

Pollen (I think).

The amoebas came from my daughter's bedroom.  Not from the carpet or the bed or in some corner of the closet, but from the fish tank.  The fish tank that was waaaaaaaay overdue for a cleaning.  So I saved a little of the green gunk from the filter and put that under the microscope.

Classic example of an amoeba.  Eating something or other.

Some sort of nematode, just cruising 'round the block.

Rhiannon found the fish tank microscopic life much more interesting (as did I) and to quote her, the fish tank goo was neat and the poop was "just poop".

I love homeschooling on the homestead!

Oh Poop.

I was out doing some barn chores this afternoon and almost stepped in a very runny, very messy goat poop plop.  Like, melted chocolate soft-serve ice cream kind'a plop (you're welcome for the visual).

So I immediately go around chasing goats (who normally would come running up to me, but the instant they suspect that I need them to come to me, they run for the hills) trying to figure out who's backside the abnormal plop came from.

It didn't take long to find out as Nettie's backside was icky.  I tempted her (and everyone else, of course) up to the barn by shaking a bucket and got her up on the stanchion.  I filled the feeder with a handful of alfalfa pellets, locked her in and went to gather some supplies from the house.

Since I now had my animal medical kit all straightened out, it was a breeze finding what I needed.  And while I was in the kit, I grabbed stuff to give Lily, Pickles and Chop Suey their yearly CD/T shots since they were due soon.  I went back to the barn, cleaned Nettie up and took her temperature.  102.6 degrees; pretty much normal.  Checked her eyelids and they looked a little pale, but hers never did look bright pink.  Gave her 5ml of Probios and 5ml of Vitamin B Complex and let her finish her alfalfa pellets in peace.

I'm not sure what caused her diarrhea, but now that I think about it, when I forked over some "new" hay yesterday, everyone but Nettie went running towards it.  She was laying down (as were half the herd), soaking up the sunshine so I figured she just didn't want to move from her sunny spot.  Now I wonder if she had a stomach ache.  And wonder from what.

I went out again during feeding time and took her temperature again and it was 102.3; still within normal range.  Everyone else got their normal rations of grain, but I gave Nettie more alfalfa pellets instead of grain to try and firm up things.  Tonight I'll make up a salt solution and get ready to do a fecal sample in the morning and look for any worm load.  Guess tomorrow is going to be a Turd-tastic Tuesday.

Non -Conformist Reuben Sandwich

During our Carnivore Kind'a Christmas, we dealt with lots and lots of meat.  Shot some squirrels, roast a goose, made venison sausage, smoked half of a beef brisket and started a brine on the other half of the brisket to make homemade Pastrami.

I just looked up a Pastrami brine online, trimmed most of the fat off it and soaked it in the brine for six (I think) days in the fridge.  Took it out of the brine, rinsed it off and rubbed it with a now-forgotten dry rub consisting of salt, pepper, garlic powder, crushed coriander, mustard seeds, dry mustard and brown sugar (I think).  Paul put it in the smoker and several hours later, we had our first pastrami!

We didn't have the patience to wait until it cooled off - Paul sliced right into it and we chomped down.  After sampling our efforts, it was wrapped up and put in the fridge to cool.  Eventually we hauled out the super-cool meat slicer my Dad gave me last year for a Christmas gift (or was it the year before??) and sliced it up:

Hot out'a the smoker!

Cooled & sliced....and pilfered by a hungry 4 year old.

I ran out to the grocery store to get some rye bread, swiss cheese & Thousand Island dressing.  Found some canned sauerkraut in the pantry, then set about to making a Reuben Sandwich. Well, I started out making a Reuben Sandwich and then Paul pointed out to me that a Reuben is made with corned beef, not pastrami, and he refused to let me put the Thousand Island dressing on his sandwich.  Then I decided to fry up some onions in bacon grease and then fry the sauerkraut up with it instead of just plopping the plain kraut on the sandwich.  So it wasn't really a traditional Reuben Sandwich.

But then again, we're not your traditional kind'a folk, now are we?

We're continuing our quest to make & process as much of our own foodstuffs at home, and being able to make lunch meats is a very nice addition to the larder.  Sometimes I crave soup and sandwiches for lunch or supper (heck, even breakfast) and sandwiches are a quick and easy meal to make for Paul's lunch.  The meat slicer has made all of this infinitely easier, although one could simply thinly slice the slabs of meats, it would just take a little more time.  We've also been able to buy larger chunks of meat from the store and slice it up at home vs. buying lunch meat from the deli and it saves quite a bit of money.  Of course, we don't eat the entire five pound mound of freshly-sliced meat.  I package it in sandwich sized zippy bags, squeeze as much of the air out of it, and pop them in the freezer.  The smaller sizes ensure a quicker defrost time as well as ensuring that we eat all of it before it goes bad.

I doubt that we'll tire of the pastrami though.  If anything, I think we'll try and find someone with a butcher steer and see if we can get another brisket from it.